Laminate flooring is a popular flooring product due to its ease of installment as well as its performance. Additionally, the various designs which are available for laminate flooring enhance its popularity with consumers. The designs include wood-grain patterns, slate, marble, mosaic, and granite. Additionally, a number of specialized products have been designed to ease installation of laminate flooring. Such products include transition strips, end caps, stair nosings, moldings and baseboards.
When laminates were first introduced, there was only one method of installation. The laminates were produced in a “tongue and groove” design. When installing the laminate, the tongue and grooves were glued together, then clamped and left to dry. Manufacturers have since developed flooring that requires no glue at all.
Accordingly, installation of laminate flooring has been significantly simplified. One difficult aspect of installation that remains, however, is cutting the laminate flooring to fit within a particular area. Most laminates are provided in planks that are 7-8 inches wide and about 4 foot long. Depending upon the width of a room, the final course of planks may need to be ripped to the appropriate width. Moreover, the lengths of the planks at opposing walls need to be trimmed. Additionally, miter cuts may be required to contour the planks to fit the contours of a particular room.
Once the flooring has been installed, a baseboard or trim is typically installed on the walls adjacent to the flooring. At locations where walls meet, the trim is generally mitered so as to form a finished corner. Miter cuts of this type require a different orientation of the work piece compared to miter cuts on flooring work pieces. A typical flooring saw, however, does not provide the requisite clearing to accommodate trim pieces of more than about an inch.
Traditionally, a number of different types of saws have been used to make the necessary miter and rip cuts in laminate floors and baseboards. Such saws include table saws, hand saws, jig saws and circular saws. Each of these types of saws provides some advantages. A table saw gives very precise cuts and can be used to rip cut a work-piece. Additionally, table saws can be configured to provide angled cuts by angling the work-piece and/or the saw blade. Table saws can also accommodate baseboards and trim pieces which can have heights of up to seven inches. Table saws, however, even the so called “portable” table saws, are large and heavy. Thus, an installer must either undertake the difficulty of transporting the table saw to a location near the area where the laminate and trim is to be installed or carry each piece of laminate and trim back and forth from the work area to the saw location. Additionally, many homeowners attempt to install a laminate floor on their own. In the event the homeowner does not own a table saw, a different approach is needed.
Hand saws are, in stark contrast to table saws, extremely mobile. Hand saws are also, however, labor intensive. Thus, while handsaws may reasonably be used to make cuts of a few feet, the large number of planks that may need to be cut for a particular installation presents a daunting challenge to those using handsaws. Moreover, handsaws are generally not as accurate as table saws which can result in unacceptable joints in trim work.
Jig saws and circular saws are generally much more “portable” than table saws and greatly facilitate making a large number of cuts. Depending upon the particular jigs available to an installer, however, these saws still do not provide the accuracy achievable with a table saw. Thus, while professional installers may become very skilled with using a jig saw or circular saw, other users may generate an undesired amount of scrap as a result of erroneous cuts.
What is needed is a system which can be used to rip cut a work piece and to miter cut the work piece. What is further needed is a system which is portable so that it can be located at a work site. A further need is for a system that can provide the required portability while providing accurate cuts. Yet another need is for a system that can accommodate work pieces of increased height.